


purgatory

by dissembler



Category: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: Gross Anatomical Language, M/M, Masturbation, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Repression, Victorian Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:33:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27616295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dissembler/pseuds/dissembler
Summary: Not all of Hyde dissipates swiftly tonight.
Relationships: Edward Hyde/Dr. Henry Jekyll
Comments: 3
Kudos: 38
Collections: Corsets & Lemons 2019 round - 1800 literature





	purgatory

Tonight, while the cloak of Hyde has been once more doffed and himself returned in place, Henry finds himself without the languor that usually succeeds his nightly excursions. Instead, his blood thunders through him, that most vital of his organs sending forth life with almost violent force: an abnormal reaction that must be investigated.

His symptoms, the bounding heart and trembling hand, shallow breathing and painful awareness of his body, he cannot ascribe simply to the pain of the shift, for that had been no more than expected and indeed, so seasoned is he at the process, he had barely felt it. Nor can he attribute them to some variance in the draught, for each part had been measured with utmost care and to exact amounts. Of course, though the draught was made the same, he knows that his own chemical response may have altered, his body forming some sort of tolerance to the concoction or perhaps, more malignly, a resistance. But, such things usually take more time than this and there is no need to fret over such disasters yet. His symptoms would point any reasonable doctor to a common diagnosis: an excess of nervous energy. Still, he ought to make a note of it, he thinks, when his hands cease their shaking, and should this happen again after the return to himself he will make a more thorough investigation.

Thus diagnosed, all that remains is to prescribe himself the tried and tested two-part cure: calm and rest. Happily, he has left a book upon the table which should serve the first part nicely and hasten about the second. This tract, written by an Oxford cleric before the papist turn of that school, is one of his particular favourites, well-thumbed by him, and thus he does not immediately notice the exceptional rough treatment. Only when he flicks to the page marked by the ribbon does he see what vile uses this excellent work has been put to; written there, upon the previously pure pages of this good and noble treatise are unutterable blasphemies, words of unspeakable coarseness, set down in the back slanted mirror of his own hand. 

He means to slam the book shut but cannot, transfixed as he is by Hyde’s work and drawn in, held, by numerous direct addresses to him. Hyde has viciously underlined, quite scoring through that page and onto the one beneath, a moral lesson and aside of it scrawled such vile obscenities, such wicked promises, as paralyse Henry with their sheer force. His pulse, having ticked up further first in anger, now races for a lower cause as his eyes light upon spiked sketches, lurid in their anatomical accuracy and enough to make even the most practiced sinner blush. To one particular drawing, that of a woman’s intimate parts, is appended a piece of writing so vivid in its detail that across Henry’s mind burn images of the very act done in Hyde’s form. 

With horror, Henry comes to awareness of his member responding to these base thoughts, engorging with blood and rising as if bid by Hyde, and he drops the book instinctively so as not to taint the pages with his body’s prurience. With deuced bad luck the thing falls to the table open on the pages upon which the pornographic images have already soiled the high, virtuous words. Henry can scarcely look at it, but cannot look away, still transfixed by Hyde’s monstrous desecration.

It is not because he has been bid to, he tells himself as he unbuttons his trousers, he is master here and of this rising, the reaction of the body, that is Hyde’s completely he, Henry Jekyll, wants none. The act he must perform here is mere purgation, nothing more, and certainly not a concession to the several depraved scribblings that allude to his polluting himself so. He takes himself in hand and, pushing away all thoughts but those of science which like fire purifies, begins to rub. 

At first, he tries to look away, reciting in his mind the minutiae of this body part, the ducts and tubes that make it up, but, when he glances into the fire he sees in the flames such licentious images as echo the nauseating drawings in the book and bring forward jagged memories of Hyde’s carnal depravities, he finds his prick stiffening further. Desperately, he looks at the table upon which his chemical apparatus is set and again is powerless to stop prurient thoughts, associations that spring up at the sight of the straight tubes and the globes of the volumetric flasks. Finally he prays that he may leech this activity of sordid pleasure by fixing his gaze without compromise upon the gruesome flesh itself.

From the radix, its root in a thatch of greying hair, to the retracting prepuce his member stands forth, purpling and ugly, and the searing heat of that smooth skin puts him in the mind of the devil, of Hyde. As soon as that thought sets in, no rattling off of anatomic terms can save him: before his very eyes, the hand around his prick morphs into the corded, spidery one of Edward Hyde, the grip tightening to the point of pain. The knowledge that this is mere hallucination affords no balm against it, he is taken in.

Betraying him utterly, his senses conjure a pleasure palace, the chemical whiffs of his cabinet transformed into perfume and the coiling yellow fog that lingers on the floor from Hyde’s return to the fug of cigarette fumes, the incense smoke of braziers. Into this house of ill repute he is thrust prick first and he imagines he can feel the heavy presence of Hyde behind him, pawing and pulling at his ramrod with vicious delight. Added to this unholy illusion are the very real gasps of his breath, hitching and unto his own ears lewd and wanton.

Slamming his eyes shut does nothing to dispel the mirage, instead it pulls him deeper in, closer to the very edge. As his crisis looms he flings out his free hand to grip, fiercely, the arm of his chair as if, white-knuckled and aching, a hand upon a tether to his cabinet might free him of the spell. It does not, and the hand upon his member twists violently forcing him to spend his essence in spurts far stronger than a man his age ought be able to muster.

Winded and horrified, the scales about his eyes fall and leave Henry Jekyll upon the chair in his cabinet, soiled and red with shame; the hand around his prick his own fine white one. He releases as if scalded and tucks himself away.

He must examine the draught, he thinks, he must note the measurements, amend perhaps the mathematics. His heart, _his_ heart, is slowing now, his breath easier to catch. He rises and steps away from that chair, ruined now. He must make tea, he must sleep. 

He must fix the threshold too, and bar out the insidious, creeping fog.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt on Corsets and Lemons: 
> 
> ' _"This brought them to the fireside, where the easy-chair was drawn cosily up, and the tea-things stood ready to the sitter's elbow, the very sugar in the cup. There were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea-things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand, with startling blasphemies."_
> 
> So what I'm saying is, Hyde writes Jekyll obscene messages, Jekyll is Into It.'
> 
> Jekyll is, reluctantly, into it.


End file.
